Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine
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Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine by Evyn Lê Espiritu A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair Professor Daniel Boyarin Professor Colleen Lye Professor Keith Feldman Summer 2018 Abstract Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine by Evyn Lê Espiritu Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair Archipelago of Resettlement charts the routes and roots of postwar Vietnamese refugees to two understudied sites of diasporic resettlement. From April to November 1975, the U.S. military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on Guam; from 1977 to 1979, Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Theorizing the figure of the archipelago, this dissertation charts connections between non-contiguous, seemingly disparate sites of analysis. Despite important differences between these two case studies, Guam and Israel-Palestine are connected via two interrelated nodes of political violence. First, both are strategic sites of U.S. military empire. Second, both are spaces of settler colonialism. Vietnamese refugees absorbed into these spaces must grapple with what this dissertation calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. Organized into three sections of two chapters each, Archipelago of Resettlement reconfigures understandings of both space and time. “Part I: Uncovering Sourcings” focuses on the pre-1975 period prior to Vietnamese refugee resettlement, offering an alternative genealogy of Asian American politics and a diasporic history of Third World Liberation. Chapter one re-remembers an occluded genealogy of Asian American political subjectivity. Rather than accept Guam and Israel-Palestine as relatively recent concerns for the field of Asian American studies, this chapter insists on the foundational influence of U.S. settler militarism in Guam, and American support of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, in shaping the emergence of an Asian American racial politics in the late 1960s. Chapter two theorizes and exemplifies a method of diasporic history: one that traces connections between seemingly unrelated spaces and times in order to illuminate contours of power—in this case, U.S. military empire—and articulate points of coalition between differentially-situated struggles against this structure of power—such as the contemporaneous decolonial movements in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam. “Part II: Tracing Passages” analyzes the passage of Vietnamese refugees to Guam in 1975 and to Israel in 1977 and 1979, mapping archipelagoes of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. Drawing 1 heavily from original archival research conducted at the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) and the Israel State Archives (ISA), this section critiques the settler colonial institutions’ moral cooptation of the Vietnamese refugee crisis, identifying how such institutions—the U.S. military on Guam and the Israeli government in Israel—used humanitarian rhetoric in order to direct attention away from ongoing Indigenous dispossession. Such humanitarian rhetoric positioned Vietnamese refugees in an antagonistic relationship to Indigenous struggles for decolonization, since the refugee figure was coopted to re-justify the benevolent power of the military and the state. Both chapter three, which focuses on Guam, and chapter four, which focuses on Israel-Palestine, end with instances of refugee refusal: that is, the refusal to conform to the script of the “good refugee” and to ventriloquize state narratives of military and governmental benevolence, in the face of ongoing settler colonial violence. “Part III: Unsettling Resettlements” examines cultural texts depicting the refugee settler condition in Guam and Israel-Palestine. How was the late 1970s moment of archipelagic Vietnamese refugee resettlement remembered, represented, and reconfigured? How do Vietnamese refugee settlers relate to ongoing Chamorro efforts for decolonization and Palestinian struggles for liberation? Chapter five reads three quotidian texts—a Chamorro high school student’s article, a Vietnamese refugee repatriate’s memoir, and a mixed Chamorro-and- Vietnamese college student’s blog—to query the temporality of settler militarism on Guam. Unlike other forms of settler colonialism, in which the settler articulates an affective permanent attachment to the land, settler militarism on Guam is marked by the transient nature of militarized bodies that circulate between U.S. bases, eluding traditional forms of settlement. The politics of staying, of (re)settling, then, resonates very differently on Guam than in other settler colonial contexts. Chapter six grapples with the overlapping temporalities of multiple claims to the land of Israel-Palestine. Both Jewish Zionists and displaced Palestinians claim nativity to the land of historic Palestine. Thrust into this conflict, Vietnamese refugees, who were absorbed by the State of Israel in the late 1970s, were forced to navigate the conflicting temporal claims of these two populations. In order to navigate these temporal entanglements, this chapter draws from Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s assertion that “Our homeland is the shape of the time we spent in it.” This chapter concludes by examining the archipelagic movement of the refugee settler condition, from Israel-Palestine back to Vietnam. What happens when Vietnamese Israelis, whose lands were confiscated and redistributed by the post-1975 Communist government of Vietnam when they left as refugees, return to reclaim their lands? This chapter analyzes the film The Journey of Vaan Nguyen to argue that another way that Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians can begin to articulate an emergent vocabulary of potential parallels across the impasses of settler colonialism is by juxtaposing the uneven similarities between their two populations’ respective histories of land dispossession. Archipelago of Resettlement concludes with a gesture towards futurities. An afterword discusses works of Vietnamese diasporic speculative fiction to query how an archipelagic Vietnamese refugee sensibility can point us towards an ethical response to the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis, and how the refugee histories analyzed in this dissertation promise to haunt and shape our futures. 2 Acknowledgements This dissertation is the product of many different questions, conversations, and insights. Special thanks to my committee members, Professors Trinh T. Minh-ha, Daniel Boyarin, Colleen Lye, and Keith Feldman, for believing in the project and for challenging me to think deeply and theoretically; to everyone I met and interviewed in Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine, for welcoming me and sharing their stories; to my fellow graduate student interlocutors, especially Rachel Haejin Lim, who provided critical feedback on my writing; to my partner, Ashvin Gandhi, for his endless friendship and support; and to my family, especially my mother and grandmother, who taught me what it means to be a fierce refugee. i Table of Contents Introduction: Nước: Archipelogics and Land/Water Politics . 1 Part I: Uncovering Sourcings: Alternative Genealogies and Diasporic Histories Chapter 1: Homebase or Promised Land: Establishing Guam and Israel-Palestine’s . 31 Influence on Asian American Political Subjectivity Chapter 2: Vietnam, Palestine, Guam: A Diasporic History of Struggles for . 55 Decolonization Part II: Tracing Passages: Archipelagos of Settler Colonialism, U.S. Empire, and Refugee Refusal Chapter 3: Operation New Life: Vietnamese Refugees and U.S. Settler Militarism . 89 on Guam Chapter 4: Refugees in a State of Refuge: Vietnamese Israelis and the Question . 112 of Palestine Part III: Unsettling Resettlements: The Refugee Settler Condition in Guam, Israel- Palestine, and Vietnam Chapter 5: Refugee-Chamorro Encounters: Grappling with the Temporality of . 141 Settler Militarism on Guam Chapter 6: The Politics of Translation: Diasporic Rhetorics of Return in . 158 Israel-Palestine and Vietnam Afterword: Refugee Futurities: Floating Islands on a Horizon of Care . 181 Bibliography . 191 ii Introduction: Nước: Archipelogics and Land/Water Politics “In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nước.” -lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For “Beirut was the birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who knew no other cradle. Beirut was an island upon which Arab immigrants dreaming of a new world landed.” -Mahmoud Darwish, Memory of Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 “ . Remember: home is not simply a house, village, or island; home is an archipelago of belonging.” -Craig Santos Perez, “Off-Island Chamorros” ~ ~ ~ Vietnam is nước: water, country, homeland. Land and water. Water is land. A duality without division; a contrast without contradiction. Nước Việt Nam: a home, a cradle, a point of departure. One island in an archipelago of diasporic belonging. ~ ~ ~ According to Vietnamese mythology, Vietnam was born out of the consummation